Patch Highlights
Hey, Levelheads! We're pumped to bring you PATCH 0.19 this week, which finally brings out one of our long-awaited powerups! We also have some fun new utilities in the campaign and the editor, and a couple of new blocks to play with! Pair all that with the big bundle of bug fixes and small improvements, and we've got ourselves a whopper of a patch. Enjoy!
Introducing: the Rebound!
First and MOST IMPORTANTLY, patch 0.19 finally introduces the fifth powerup: the Rebound! This one is pretty weird, so we'll just let this gif explain it:
The Rebound has been in the idea phase for over a year, just kind of chilling on the backburner, as it's a fairly non-traditional powerup and needed a lot of tweaking and polish to get it to feel right.
With the Rebound, you shoot a face orb out of your head. You can shoot enemies with the orb, or you can try to bounce off of it to give yourself a super jump! Or you can just use the recoil to launch yourself over and around obstacles. And because it fires in two-shot bursts that regenerate all at once, you can even play with the shot timing to fire three shots back to back, once you figure the thing out.
We're really excited to see what our players come up with for the Rebound, because honestly, even we have no idea what this thing is capable of.
Control that Zipper!
Our level builders often comment that the Zipper powerup can be quite challenging to build levels around. Once you give the player a Zipper, you suddenly have to be very careful, because the player can get through ANY walls! Well, NOT ANYMORE! Now, with Lead Block technology, you can keep that player from zipping... anywhere!
Oh, but don't worry -- lead blocks can be tied to switches, too! So if you want to let the player zip through later, you've got the option!
To spike, or not to spike?
Sometimes you want a block. Sometimes you want a spike.
WELL NOW YOU'VE GOT BOTH! Introducing the SPIKE BLOCK! Spike Blocks behave like Hardlights -- they automatically turn on and off on their own, but you can override that behavior by attaching them to switches.
What's what I see on the horizon? Is it... Yes... It's a wave of troll levels, about to wash over us all.
On second thought... Let's go bigger.
Have you ever been building a level and then thought, "Crap... I picked the wrong size!"
Well you can throw those thoughts into the GARBAGE. Because now, you can expand or shrink your level to fit your mistakes! Er... plans. Your well-laid-out plans.
New campaign levels!
We packed three new levels onto the end of the campaign, which are meant to showcase both the Asteroid Tunnels biome and the Rebound. And Sam also went back through some of the older campaign levels and packed a few little extra toys into there, just to SPICE THINGS UP!
But once we got these campaign updates in, we realized... This campaign is getting REALLY BIG. Yeah, we want people to experience the new levels, but it sure is becoming a chore to navigate this giant campaign map. So we took care of that.
WARP SPEED AHEAD!
YEP, THAT'S RIGHT. When you are in the Inspect mode of the campaign, you can now warp to any campaign node that you have previously been to.
That should speed things up a bit! Oh, and you can also warp to the campaign node you are already sitting on. That was a bug, but we're leaving it in because it's hilarious.
New Pressure Plate Styles!
We wanted to expand the functionality of pressure plates, SO WE DID! You can now tell them to simply toggle when pressed (instead of needing to always be held), or you can even have them explode! You know, just in case... in case you needed to blow something up.
Updated Version System Incoming
Now you might be looking at this patch and thinking, "HEY WAIT A MINUTE. Did we just skip five version numbers?" YES. Yes we did. Sort of. Here's why!
Previously, the game's entire version number was used to determine the compatibility of levels. The rule was simply: If your game version is lower than the version of a level at all, then you cannot play that level.
But as Levelhead approaches the full launch, we're going to be on lots of different platforms, and those platforms will, at times, have their versions slightly out of sync with each other. We want to make sure that just because we deployed a small bug fix on one platform, doesn't mean that levels made on that platform are now totally unplayable on all platforms due to version mismatches.
So, this is where version management comes in! Starting two weeks from now, we will be updating our versioning system so that the last number (e.g. the "1" in 0.19.1) is simply used for small bug fixes, UI changes, and things that otherwise don't break compatibility of levels. Whenever the first or second number go up, those are major changes that would require an update to be able to play levels made in those versions.
This will give us the flexibility to deploy small bug fixes, interface tweaks, etc... across numerous platforms without worrying about getting everyone out of sync with each other. Then, we can try to sync up backwards-incompatible patches more reliably.
COOL, RIGHT?
THAT'S ALL, FOLKS!
That's all we have for patch 0.19! Oh, except for all that other stuff in the notes below. But other than that, THAT'S IT!
We'll see you next time!
v0.19.1 Patchnotes (since 0.14.6)
See the full patchnotes.
New Features
Editor
- You can now resize your levels by dragging the top or right sides, or the top-right corner. Levels can be rescaled up to 10,000 grid spaces, with an individual maximum width or height of 255, and a minimum of 30. If you want to downscale a level, you will first have to clear out any paths, backgrounds, and items that might be in the way.
- Pressure plates have two new styles: Toggle and Explode! Toggle pressure plates will toggle their current state when they are newly pressed, and will not lose that state when they are released. Exploding pressure plates will change state and then explode, locking that state in.
Campaign
- When you are in Campaign Inspect mode, you can now Warp to the campaign node that is in the center of your viewport, provided that node is available for you to travel to normally. Warping takes a few seconds to warm up, so it may not be ideal for short travel, but once you are traveling more than a few nodes away, it becomes a fast alternative!
New Item
- Introducing the LEAD BLOCK! The Lead Block is a static solid item that prevents GR-18 from Zipping through it. Lead Blocks can also be attached to switches. When powered via a switch, the Lead Block becomes passable via the Zipper, but still remains solid.
- Introducing a new powerup: The REBOUND! Rebound turns GR-18 into a cannon that launches bouncing orbs. The orbs deal damage to enemies, trigger pressure plates, and can be jumped off of. Firing the rebound also has a considerable amount of recoil, which launches GR-18 backwards with high speed. Rebound orbs come in a double clip, so GR-18 can fire two of them rapidly back to back. The clip fully replenishes 2 seconds after the first orb is fired.
- Introducing a new hazard: SPIKE BLOCKS. Spike Blocks can be toggled back and forth between being a walkable solid, and being a horrible, murderous spike ball. Spike Blocks can be attached to switches, or they can be left to their own devices to toggle like Hardlights.
Development
- Prototyped new "Lead Block" concept. Lead Blocks prevent the Zipper from going through them.
Improvements
Login
- Improved reliability of Steam session checking on login, so users should not be incorrectly hit with "Invalid License" errors upon login if they do indeed have a valid license.
Editor
- Added to the Name Combobulator: Daring, Diabolical.
- Added word to the name combobulator: Treat (thanks to PureKnickers)
- Added word to the name combobulator: Meteor, Asteroid, Mine, Harvest, Extract, Unit, Project (thanks to Icyglow Dangglow)
- Added a Rebound icon to the Sign item.
- Pressure Switches can now be muted.
- Added words to the name combobulator: Abyss, Chasm, Fissure, Crevasse, Gorge, Alien, Facility, Base, Moon, Blaze, Into, Apocalypse. (thanks to Spekio)
- Added words to the name combobulator: Drop, Shipment, Care, Ship.
- Added "Single Screen" tag option. (thanks to Retro Banana Man NL)
- Added to the name combobulator: Orb, Basket, Bucket, Net.
- Lead blocks are now treated as static solid items, so they can be used to bracket doors.
- Added the word "Bound" to the name combobulator.
Campaign
- Three new campaign levels are available, which introduce both the Rebound and the Asteroid Tunnels biome to the campaign track. The levels are: Bound and Rebound, Sacrifice the Box, and Quick Fire.
- When in Campaign Inspect mode, you can now see the name of the node that is in the center of the screen.
- Uh Oh now includes spikeblocks and a GR-17.
- Clockswitch Tower now includes spikeblocks and a GR-17.
- Switch Karma now includes spikeblocks.
- Tempswitch Rush now includes spikeblocks.
- Deliver the Package, GR-18! has some updated tiles.
- Break Grumble and Grin has some updated tiles.
- Temple of Karma has some updated tiles.
- You can now skip the opening cutscene of the campaign, for some reason.
- Added Rebound instruction cards to the campaign.
- The campaign now has Asteroid Tunnels level orbs floating in the background.
UI
- You can no longer tip a delisted level. (thanks to Brainmop Wippabumble)
- Updated the UIcon for the Lead Block to be more consistent with its actual visuals.
- When a level has fewer than 10 players, its difficulty diamonds will be shown as "???" since we do not have enough data to reliably infer anything about the level. This will also prevent the first couple of players from skewing the difficulty rating in one direction or the other.
- Added tooltips to the non-text buttons on the level cards and the pause menu / scoreboard.
- When you quit a playlist from the pause menu, you are now hit with a confirmation window.
- The "Diamonds" on a level now come from the server, and use a totally new formula. Previously, the diamonds were simply another way to look at the "Clear Rate" -- the proportion of attempts that resulted in a win. However, this metric unfairly displayed long levels as being "harder" than they are, since there are more opportunities to die. Now, the diamonds are intended to represent "Danger" -- how frequently the average player dies throughout the level. A green, one-star level means the average player dies extremely rarely, if at all, while a five-diamond, "Ludicrous" level means you will be dying pretty much constantly (every few seconds). Levels that have never been beaten will still be displayed as the five, hollow diamonds. Also, because the "Diamonds" rating now comes from the server, it can easily be adjusted on the fly.
- Updated the Tip button's confirmation text and border to be a gold color, so you can more easily discern when you have entered CONFIRMATION MODE!
Gameplay
- The Rebound Orb now once again triggers pressure plates.
- The Rebound Orb is now affected by fans and springs.
- The Rebound Orb now bounces off of item purge gates, not powerup purge gates.
- When a Scrubb or Ocula (in development) are defeated by a spinning, thrown Scrubb or Ocula body, they don't turn into throwable objects. They are just DESTROYED.
- When Scrubb or Ocula (in development) contain a prize (other than Jems), they no longer turn into a throwable item when jumped on. Instead, they just poof out of existence and the droppable item is in their place.
- Scrubb and Ocula (in development) have had their animation speeds updated to differentiate them from one another.
- Rebound Orbs no longer trigger pressure plates. It was... too weird.
- Rebound Orbs can now be flung by explosions.
- When a spinning Ocula or Scrubb slide along ground, they should no longer make a grinding sound (in development).
- Updated the Rebound Orb to have a minimum bounce speed, so it doesn't end up making a series of extremely fast tiny bounces along the ground.
- The Rebound no longer is a single-shot powerup. Instead, it has a 2-shot "clip", and the entire clip regenerates on a 2-second cooldown after your first shot is fired. So you will still get one shot per second as before, but you can "burst" them as needed.
- The Rebound powerup's orbs no longer knock enemies back.
- Updated the "Spike Block" object to behave the same way as Hardlights in terms of how it responds to switches, as well as timing.
- The Rebound orb now gets destroyed by fireballs and fire chainers.
- The Rebound orb now destroys non-fire projectiles.
- The Rebound orb now goes through Rifts.
- The Rebound orb now pushes pressure plates.
- The Rebound orb now allows you to see into secret areas.
- Firing the Rebound now gives you less vertical impulse if you are standing on the ground.
- The Rebound orb now bounces off of Powerup-style purge gates, but not item-style purge gates.
Optimization
- Updated the level loader to load terrain tiles over a number of steps instead of all at once, to prevent the game from hanging.
- Updated the way the game handles detecting context-aware tile visuals, to drastically reduce hitching. Previously, whenever the level was "Spawned" (like when you pressed "Play" in the editor), each context-aware tile would check the surrounding areas to determine its visuals. Now, these visuals are pre-calculated and cached, so the spawning should occur much faster. This should also reduce the likelihood that the game crashes when spawning into a level that has a huge number of enclosures.
File Handling
- Updated Rumpus file handling to be asynchronous instead of synchronous, for better cross-platform compatibility. On PC, there should be no noticeable changes.
Workoshop
- Updated the Daily Build rules.
Android
- The Home and Back on-screen buttons should now be inaccessible during gameplay on Android. They will become available when you pause.
Fixes
Development
- Updated development-side testing to always use license checking on Steam.
UI
- You should no longer be able to summon the Cheese Mode Details button outside of Cheese Mode under any circumstances. (thanks to misshapensmiley)
- The Daily Build menu should now properly draw items in their correct colors, such as keys or Hardlights.
- If you try to delist or un-delist a level in your Downloads page, the confirmation window was showing up behind your levels. This should no longer be occurring.
- When you changed your tip size, the tip size housing would not update its position instantly, causing it to jerk around for a frame.
- Added hovertext to the sharecode button on the pause screen and scoreboard.
- When you change the Zone under the Level Details page, the level icon would pop up to the top left corner of the page for one frame. This has been fixed.
- The level names on the campaign scoreboard no longer go off the edges of the screen.
- You should no longer see work-in-progress items under the Background variants tab of the editor while in the Daily Build.
- When you quit a level from the pause menu, the level no longer temporarily resumes for a few frames.
Audio
- Increased the sound priority of GR-18's death sequence, so the death sound doesn't get overridden by other sounds.
- Throwable items that bounce vertically should no longer make their bounce sounds unless they bounce decently hard off the ground or ceiling, to avoid spamming sounds.
Editor
- Fixed some issues with the Name Combobulator not detecting the cursor when scrolling.
- Pressing non-valid keys in the Name Combobulator will no longer jump to the beginning of a list.
- GR-18 now presses Pressure Switches in the editor.
- Fixed an issue with surrounding tiles not updating properly when you deleted an enclosure that had an item sitting on top of it. (thanks to misshapensmiley)
- Fixed an issue where placing an Environment Column on top of Enclosures would result in the Environment Column being invisible until level reload.
- Pressing "Escape" to cancel a biome change in the Level Details page was leaving residual terrain tiles from other biomes. This has been fixed. (thanks to Wumpybami Rampygop)
- You can no longer change item properties while saving a level.
- When you place a static solid item (such as a Lead Block) on top of terrain, the terrain should now properly update.
- When you drag to place an item next to another of the same item, if the two items don't have matching properties, they should no longer scalepop together.
- Fixed some issues with enclosures and backdrops not updating the surrounding terrain properly if there was an item sitting on top of the enclosure/backdrop when it was changed.
- If you drag an item into terrain, the surrounding terrain should now update properly.
- You should no longer be able to "Undo" things while the level is saving.
- Toggle pressure switches should now properly represent their state in the editor.
- When you undo, one-way platforms should properly update their visuals.
- Fixed an issue caused by the context-aware tile changes that would sometimes cause tiles to be invisible if you drag-placed context-aware tiles of one kind over context-aware tiles of a different kind.
Visuals
- The Asteroid Tunnels biome had a slightly incorrect color past its bottom edge. It is now fixed!
- When you reloaded at a checkpoint, Spike Blocks would always show a Spiky frame before loading the correct frame. They should now always load on the proper frame.
- Fixed vertical alignment issues with Fallthrough Kronkrete.
Nintendo Switch
- Fixed a crash that would occur when trying to cancel logging in via email on the Nintendo Switch.
- The shaders used on Rifts have been disabled on the Nintendo Switch, due to compatibility issues.
- When using single Joy-Cons, the visuals for controller buttons should now be properly updated.
Gameplay
- When you use the Zipper while being shot out of a blaster, it should now correctly zip you in the direction you are pressing with your controls. (thanks to Ononga Rampytrippee)
- The Rebound Orb should now properly display its exploding visuals when destroyed by a fire chainer.
- Exploding pressure switches will no longer explode before the level starts if something is pressing on them.
- If you lined up a row of exploding pressure switches so they were all pressing against each other, then only every other switch would explode, since they were processed sequentially. This should no longer be the case--they should now all explode.
- Rebound Orbs should no longer explode and make sounds if they are destroyed by a level restart or level end.
- If are you are partially inside a spike block when it turns solid, you should be pushed out of it.
- Fixed game physics so that large enemies no longer slide downwward through 1-grid-space pillars.
- Updated Spike Blocks to be more immediately responsive when changing states.
- Updated hitboxes of 2x2 and 3x3 Spiketrons and hazardous Spike Blocks to be rectangular instead of circular. This should make it quite difficult (if not impossible) to Zipper in between two giant spikes that are touching each other, or to squeeze diagonally through two giant spiketrons that are touching. This change only applies to the physics of levels build in this patch and later.
- Switched Spike Blocks back to "On" being hazardous, to bring them in line with other hazard items (instead of Hardlights).
- Updated the Rebound Orb to use both of its face frames.
- The Rebound Orb should now be properly respected by Regret Gates.
Web
- Added a 20-second timeout to the Rumpus Item Syncer, so if the server hangs you won't be trapped on the main menu until the heat death of the universe while Rumpus tries to sync your profile.
File Management
- Updated workshop cloud syncing to use asynchronous file operations for cross-platform use. PC users should see no difference in behavior when syncing or unsyncing cloud levels.
Workshop
- You can no longer click the daily build button while the workshop cloud downloader is doing its thing.